As a dyslexic I find reading a chore and generally listen to audio books. However, one of the easiest writer for me to read is Hunt S. Thompson. Maybe it's because we shared an affinity for psycodelics (sp) but I get that guy.

Have fun, Jan

Fairly close - "psychedelic" - and though I've no affinity with them myself (nor am I dyslexic) I agree that Hunter S. Thompson is for me an "easy" read, as his style seems to be something that really clicks with me. FWIW I am, occasionally (when some here might say I'm perhaps a bit more excessive in written presentation than is indicated in this particular post), asked if I have partaken of something psychoactive, so maybe you've hit the nail on the head there.

But, yes, I feel I get him too, straight to the centrebrain like an icepick of enlightenment.

I've not read Ulysses by James Joyce, but I will, as I've read excerpts and I got the very same sense that I get from Hunter S. Thompson, but better. Finnegan's Wake may be more difficult.

Well, [Naked Lunch] wasn't meant to be read At least, not straight through or in its entirety--just picked up and opened at random from time to time.

My problem with William Burroughs is that he's repetitious -- not only in that book, but in nearly everything he wrote after Junky, a novel which I prefer infinitely to what came after (as did Lou Reed, who actually told Bill so).

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The Cronenberg movie was pretty sweet.

You might be interested in this interview with Burroughs by Allen Ginsberg, which I had the pleasure of editing before we published it. Turns out Burroughs liked the film adaptation more than a lot of his fans did. Ginsberg liked it, but his vast pulsating ego winced at the flick's portrayal of him (which comes from the book Literary Outlaws, which was as much a source for Cronenberg's film as the (pr)eponymous novel).

Burroughs and Ginsberg also talk about assembling Interzone from a Sargasso Sea of notebooks and tattered papers (some of which might originally have been attached to a cardboard roll! (jk)), and mention that, without Kerouac and his prodigious typing skills, that book would not exist.

The film Naked Lunch worked in part because Cronenberg's own fetishes are far from those of Burroughs -- he needed the distance from the subject, I think, to give the film those levels (there's a lot of carefree finger-painting with feces in the book). I've always thought his adaptation of Crash wasn't nearly as good because C's impulses got the better of him. He and Ballard seem to have the exact same fetishes, with Ballard being the more objective of the two.

I also wanted to say that To the Lighthouse isn't at all difficult in terms of meaning and I love the way V. Woolf writes stylistically.

What I find most tedious are books without any music in the style, and Woolf and Joyce were both musicians.

Instead of endlessly asserting that only pompous asses could possibly like [Insert name of book by Joyce, Woolf, etc.], why not try this little exercise in empathy? If you're a fan of Game of Thrones, then substitute the title of any book by George R. R. Martin for the one you're criticizing and imagine crowds of people calling you a vast inflated rectum of self-importance. Consider how it feels to be vilified in the abstract simply because you enjoy reading a work of fiction.

A friend of mine even insists that the earlier versions of FW are better. In his view, Joyce's overarching ambition left him nothing to do after writing his last novel than to squander his remaining days packing in more unnecessary layers. To quote the great Ron Kolm (after a few drinks), "He couldn't exactly follow that up with a cookbook."

Asserting that any of the layers in Joyce are unnecessary is a hard sell to those who've spent time decoding them, but here's my question: How many writers genuinely picked up where Joyce left off in FW, let alone, did something memorable with the exercise? You can think of writers who were influenced by Joyce (Thomas, Levertov and O'Brien, for example), but how many went as far as or further than he did? And beyond the difficulty of FW, how many of us thought we'd ever reach a single reader if we tried to imitate it?

Far more people have imitated Joyce's great student, Samuel Beckett (who is also supposed to be difficult but isn't). Despite my admiration for late Joyce and belief in studying him, the better models have always seemed to me to be Bernhard and late Beckett for music, Nabokov for style, precision and structure, and Borges for readable compression. That's not counting earlier Joyce, however, which every student ought to try to study (Portrait, Dubliners, etc.).

In terms of texture, Gertrude Stein can be difficult semantically but has the syntax and diction of a fractured nursery rhyme. Another book I might add to the difficult list is Derrida's Glas (here's a page from the English translation), which isn't terribly hard to follow in terms of the actual writing, but imitates the anarchic layout which any page of text had for Derrida himself. The author, you see, was severely dyslexic.

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is called a genius, and it’s from that vantage her writing is read — or not read, since awe and reverence are regularly met by dismissal and ridicule. . . .

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I enjoy Stein most as a theorist: her ideas startle me, in whatever form they appear. (I call myself an inexpert.) One of those ideas was that becoming a classic could kill a work of art. Readers’ responses should shift . . . with changing times to make a book new(er); otherwise it doesn’t truly live in the present. If Stein becomes an endpoint for literary invention — a classic — her work can’t be read in the present tense. I figure that if Stein were alive now, she’d be rambunctious differently. And she wouldn’t be writing like Gertrude Stein.

I seam to me that a good book is an easy one. It's mean to tell a story / deliver information, not to be a pain to read.

Then there is of course the fact that that language evolves though time.

Some books are meant to be easy to read and some are not. It depends on the intentions, style and evolution of the writer, which do not necessarily parallel the evolution of language and usage in general.

The reader's intention comes into play later, in terms of selecting which books to read. We can likely agree that that is essentially a personal choice and that absolute taste does not exist.

The problem is when any group of people assume their taste is normative: When those who prefer an easier (or harder) style would impose their preferences on everyone else. That happened famously in Germany in the '40s (to all the arts and not just lit, of course), but it continues to happen today wherever a group of people assume they have the right to tell everyone else how to write and what to read.

Thanks for the link, Prestidigitweeze, it’s an interesting essay. This phrase

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Stein’s works of consciousness depend on a reader’s consciousness, and unconscious, to engage them. Otherwise, her writing is flat, the rhythms and play of her words lost along with her biting wit and clarity.

seems to describe best why her texts are difficult if you’re not in the right mind to read them. (Cue dismissive joke about the ambivalence of the term right mind here, if you must, readers of stories.)

The Good Earth was really high up there. I wonder why. I only read it a month or two ago and the text was fairly straightforward. The only complexity I could see was in appreciating the cultural/period differences, but I would have thought those kinds of concepts would be better understood these days.

The Good Earth was really high up there. I wonder why. I only read it a month or two ago and the text was fairly straightforward. The only complexity I could see was in appreciating the cultural/period differences, but I would have thought those kinds of concepts would be better understood these days.

Lexile measures have nothing to do with how familiar the content may or may not be to the kids. It's based (either largely or completely, I'm not sure) on word frequency and sentence length. I've seen basic, shortish non-fiction books with absurdly high Lexile scores - books about different sorts of animals, for example - mainly because they keep introducing new words instead of repeating the same ones.

Lexile measures have nothing to do with how familiar the content may or may not be to the kids. It's based (either largely or completely, I'm not sure) on word frequency and sentence length. I've seen basic, shortish non-fiction books with absurdly high Lexile scores - books about different sorts of animals, for example - mainly because they keep introducing new words instead of repeating the same ones.

Thanks. I don't actually know much about the concept. Definitely mystified about The Good Earth then. I obviously didn't do an analysis using these measures, but I had the impression it was on the simplistic rather than the complex side.

Maybe because it was using many words that referred to distinctly Chinese concepts it was increasing the amount of unique words - like your animal book example.

I don't know how many times I have tried to read Delany's Dhalgren but it is at least a dozen and I just cannot make it past 20 pages or so. I've read Paradise Lost and, of course, Moby Dick. Milton is just a PITA and odd so I agree there about Paradise Lost. Read as a class though it was at least a bit interesting. I actually quite liked Moby Dick and did not find it a tough read as a pre-teen.

Hands down impossible reads for me would be Homer. Illiad & Odyssey are, to me, totally incomprehensible to the point of inducing the need for therapy.

FW is indeed more poetry than prose. Metalinguistic experiments with form and narrative. And it certainly has predecessors like Lewis Carroll.

BTW, upon reading this thread went on to read the first 5 chapters of To the Lighthouse. Another experiment in narrative where things are not quite told , but rather inferred from the thoughts by the multilayered points of view of characters, which turns the reading as fun as unfolding Sherlock Holmes mysteries. There is a story there, but it's not the simplistic family-goes-to-a-lighthouse as I've heard some people diss it before...